


You're a Man Now, Boy

by TheVineSpeaketh



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Gratuitous Swearing, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Possibly Pre-Slash, Possibly Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 08:31:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7260199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVineSpeaketh/pseuds/TheVineSpeaketh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the wonderful <a href="http://desertvales.tumblr.com">desertvales</a>, the Bukky to my Stebe. </p><p>Bucky looked back on that memory as his moment of clarity. If anyone asked, he’d say that was when he’d grown up: a fourteen-year-old scraping the bottom of the barrel to keep someone else afloat. Long nights with aching limbs and tired feet. Worrying about Steve with all of his heart, even while his fingers froze. Just a kid.</p><p>“Congratulations,” he’d think to himself when the memory became fresh. “You’re a man now, boy.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're a Man Now, Boy

**Author's Note:**

> This is me throwing a lot of stuff out there because I've been having a hard time writing, so this is me getting back into the swing of things (like characters! and writing in general)! I hope this is coherent and not too cheesy, and I'm sorry!
> 
> This is for my darling [desertvales](http://desertvales.tumblr.com)! You shall be getting your fluff soon, worry not. I hope you enjoy this, Strawbucky! (That name is now a Thing. Why didn't I think of it before???)
> 
> Title based on Raleigh Ritchie's song of the same name.

Bucky didn’t feel like going out. But the enlistment papers were heavy in his hands—heavier than they had any right to be. He felt a hot coal in his stomach. He felt a block of ice in his chest. He felt a lot of things.

The uniform fit him well. The cut followed the tapering of his waist and stretched wide across his shoulders. He smoothed his hand down the front, his fingers catching on the buttons, on the belt. His hat sat atop his well-groomed hair. He didn’t look like Bucky, the scrappy young man from the harder part of Brooklyn. He looked like James Barnes, a sergeant in the United States Army. Clean-cut, hardworking. A gentleman whose smile could floor any dame.

Bucky tried it on, mustering up a cocky grin. He hated how good it looked when he was in the uniform. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of anything that he should have been thinking about. Not about how girls loved a good-looking man in uniform—he could have any gal he wanted. Not about how he had enlisted because he knew somebody like him was waiting for the draft to snatch him up; he had worker’s hands, a stone heart, and his sinewy frame had sent bigger guys scrambling to get away. Not about how he was dying slowly, he was sure of it, because nerves were eating him from the inside out. Not about how he was scared as shit for himself.

All he could think about was what he was leaving behind, and how that scared him so much _more_.

He couldn’t bear the mirror anymore. He turned on his heel and left to find Steve.

(~~~~)

Bucky found him in an alley behind the movie theater, because _of course_ he did.

He looked like hell, ragged skin on his knuckles and a split lip, his hair out of place, and Bucky had the usual swelling feeling of “fuck _everyone_ who touches him, who tries to harm him, who tries to take his beliefs away from him,” and it’s easier to get the kid to fuck off than it usually is. Bucky is at once hyperaware of and oblivious to the uniform he’s wearing. He sees it reflected in the fear in the kid’s eyes as he scarpers off, but he somehow feels more vengeful than is his norm in these situations, and he doesn’t doubt it’s that look on his face that could inspire the same sort of look.

But he wasn’t here to see the kid. He turns to Steve and tries to muster a smile. It comes easily.

Bucky had been afraid of Steve calling him out for enlisting. After all, it was Steve’s calling to throw himself into military service, to put his own body before others’, and Bucky had seen that even before America had joined the war. Steve defied expectations as per usual, and only with his eyes, no less: baby blues that he’d known nearly all his life had taken in the uniform and the fresh haircut and had given him a look of admiration, sadness, concern, jealousy, and—God, there was so much there. It was too hard to keep looking.

So Bucky looked down, scuffed the toe of his shoe into the dirt just to see the shine tarnished. It felt comforting somehow to see the newness of himself fading. He was still the same old Bucky, still the same kid from Brooklyn, just hiding underneath a grown-up’s uniform. Steve was nothing but supportive, asking Bucky where he was going and when he was being shipped off, and Bucky played the part, smiling and talking and lining up a night out for the two of them with some ladies he’d picked up earlier.

The truth was, he was angry, because Steve ought to have been upset with Bucky, but he wasn’t, not even a little bit. No matter how Bucky chucked a fit, Steve had always disregarded himself for the sake of others. It pissed Bucky off. Just because he didn’t think that much about it didn’t mean that Bucky didn’t. Steve drove him insane. He fucking hated it, but it wasn’t ever anything serious. He could never actually be angry at Steve; it’d never gotten that far. He couldn’t hate him for anything, especially something as stupid as this.

But if anything, Steve seemed more determined to try, and _that_ downright killed him. He wanted to take Steve by his shoulders and shake him. Make him understand. Bucky wasn’t doing this because it was smart. He wasn’t doing this because he was loyal to his country, wanting to help others like Steve could. He wasn’t shipping himself off to hell (because the propaganda hadn’t cut through the layer of caution he’d built around himself, not one bit) because he felt a responsibility to protect his nation. He wasn’t the picturesque soldier signing himself up to do what’s right.

He was fighting for something, alright, but it wasn’t anything the history books would glorify. Nothing good soldiers would’ve cared said out loud. There was only one thing on this entire fucking earth that he was protecting, and it was walking right next to him.

“Barnes,” he thought to himself as he dragged Steve along to the exhibition, “you’re going to hell.”

He laughed at Steve’s joke, feeling his cheeks crease while his uniform stayed crisp and smooth.

(~~~~)

_Welcome to the end of days, Barnes._

He remembered someone saying that when he’d arrived—maybe it was Hoagland, the asshole with bright ginger hair and freckles across his nose who didn’t share the cigars his wife sent him with anyone else. It might have been Tyler, but considering Tyler didn’t talk about much in general, Bucky doubted it. He couldn’t remember who it was clearly, because little things like words and who said them seemed to trickle away in the face of something bigger, like war. Like killing.

Bucky killed his first kraut when they got a bit too close to an outpost. He didn’t remember the who or what or how of it, but someone had appeared in front of him, and suddenly the guy had fallen, and Bucky was somehow holding a gun. His memory had been whited out by the loud crack of gunfire, but the face—he’d probably remember that forever, maybe. The kid, fucking Christ. He’d only been a _kid_ , with blonde hair and a small form huddled in a warm jacket. There was a hole in his neck. He was gurgling— _still alive_. So Bucky’s gun pointed at his head. There was another bang.

“Christ alive,” someone had said—maybe it had been Hoagland, or Tyler. Bucky couldn’t remember.

Later on, dinner was served at camp, and Bucky found himself surrounded by people.

“What was it like?” someone asked.

“How did it feel?” someone else asked.

Bucky had thought maybe he wouldn’t eat, but he found himself shoveling food in his mouth as if he was ravenous. He’d thought he would have thrown up earlier, but he didn’t even feel nauseated. He looked up at the men who shared his barracks and tried to remember how he had felt waking up near them this morning. What he’d felt looking at their faces. There was nothing there, as if it’d never existed.

“Don’t remember,” he replied, and turned his attention back to his food.

“Christ, Barnes,” someone said, but Bucky didn’t care who.

(~~~~)

In all honesty, he should’ve seen it coming. He’d been picked out after he’d killed someone from long distance when their sniper had been hit. There was a gap in their defense, and Bucky hadn’t hesitated; he’d moved for the rifle long before he’d realized he was doing it, had taken aim. Something had shifted into place, completing what he was sure was the entire portrait of himself. The battlefield had become the canvas onto which Bucky could splatter every vitriolic part of himself and see what stuck.

Sniping had stuck.

Word had spread through the ranks, and sure enough, he was soon put up for proper training. Just a few weeks, the brass said—just until he got a hold of it. Bucky didn’t need to ask why it was so short a time. He knew as much as everyone else that things were slowly going to shit over here.

So Bucky got his own rifle, standard G.I. Fuck it, the thing was gorgeous, and it felt right in his hands.

At night, when he was on watch, he’d use the knife he’d pawned some cigarettes for to carve up twigs he found lying around. It was easy to skin them, to watch the bark flake or peel away from the smooth wood beneath, to let his fingers get tacky and to smell the semi-sweet scent of the trees. He wondered if that was what it was like to crawl and live inside them. If he built himself a cocoon, he would make it of freshly-shaven twigs and branches, and maybe it would smell like this.

When he sometimes cut his thumb, being too clumsy or something, he’d let the blood pool, a perfect pearl made of the inside of Bucky. This was what it smelled like inside him; cloying, acrid, sharp. Not at all sweet. Not at all peaceful.

He’d smear the blood on the wood and watch it dry. No. There was no cocoon he would not soil. He threw the twig into the darkness, watching it sail until he couldn’t see it anymore. He didn’t need to grow anymore, anyway.

(~~~~)

Bucky had realized a long time ago that he was no longer a boy.

He’d been fourteen. Steve had had the flu in winter and then had caught pneumonia in spring, and Bucky had worried himself into a frenzy the entire time.

He hadn’t thought much about anything else but Steve when he’d been sick. He’d lined himself up a job or two anywhere he could, working afternoons and evenings until the sun went down. All the money he got, he stashed in his pockets, clutching it in his fist to make sure none of it fell out as he walked the way to Steve’s place. He’d walk up the stairs and sneak as quietly as he could toward Steve’s door, slowly jimmying open the door a bit before forcing the money inside and pulling it back shut. He’d walk home with his fingers and toes frozen and get in long after the sun went down, and he’d go to sleep not feeling the least bit different, hoping that the money would help pay for Steve’s medicine or food or _something_ , and he’d worry himself late into the night before finally passing out.

He didn’t tell his parents, and he was too embarrassed to tell Mrs. Rogers what he was doing, or to even offer her the money. And Steve himself would shut him down immediately, ask him to stop or something, but Bucky couldn’t. If this was the one thing he could do to help, then he’d do it, and nobody needed to know anything about it.

Bucky looked back on that memory as his moment of clarity. If anyone asked, he’d say that was when he’d grown up: a fourteen-year-old scraping the bottom of the barrel to keep someone else afloat. Long nights with aching limbs and tired feet. Worrying about Steve with all of his heart, even while his fingers froze. Just a kid.

“Congratulations,” he’d think to himself when the memory became fresh. “You’re a man now, boy.”

(~~~~)

He was living in a strange sort of déjà vu. Except instead of being a kid, he was an adult, and instead of working a few shit jobs for a few pennies, he was killing Nazis and Germans.

The end goal was still the same, though, and that’s where the déjà vu came in.

(~~~~)

_Welcome to the end of days, Barnes._

Bucky couldn’t remember who said that to him, but he tried. God, _fuck,_ did he try. But things were more narrow than they’d ever been, and things were shit and useless, and his limbs weren’t working and the dog tags on his chest felt heavier than they had any right to be.

Every last bit of him thrummed with something untapped, but it was drawn to the surface with knives and needles and strange machines that hummed and screamed. He wasn’t sure where he stopped and where the monsters began. Everything was metal, even God, staring down at His creation below with hollow copper eyes. He watched Bucky and did nothing. Bucky figured he somehow deserved it.

Sometimes he caught snatches of memory, but little things like dead bodies and who they used to be seemed to trickle away in the face of something bigger, like this. He had no idea what it was, but it _hurt_ , as if he was being turned inside out and being born anew from whatever they found inside.

He had thought about cocoons and what it would be like to be burrowed inside himself, but maybe he already _had_ been. Maybe, beneath the uniform and the smile and the skin and the man and the boy was something else. Something made ravenous by the first Nazi he killed. Something that steeled his stomach and made him forget.

He screamed and bared his teeth and felt it coiling and uncoiling beneath his flesh, deep in the fibers of muscle, and he was tuned to be his most primal. Memory fell away behind this.

“I hope this kills me,” he told himself plainly. “I hope I die.” He closed his eyes and kept Steve on his mind instead. It was okay to forget everything else, but he couldn’t forget why he was here. He couldn’t forget Steve. And if he could remember him, above anything else, then he would die a happy man.

He closed his eyes, and the last thing he saw was Steve’s face. Steve, grinning at him from a bench in Central; Steve, brow furrowed as he sketched on some old paper he found; Steve, baby blues fierce with anger as he brawled yet another guy. _Steve_.

All went white.

(~~~~)

But no, no, it wasn’t meant to be.

He awoke, feeling incomplete, sore and exhausted. He hadn’t reached truth; he could feel it, but he wasn’t there.

But Steve was staring down at him. Dear fucking God, _Steve_ , Steve was in Europe, how the _fuck_ did Steve get in _Europe_ , and why was he _taller_ —

He grasped Bucky, levered him off the table, steadied is weight. Bucky reeled. Steve was holding him up. _Steve_ , dear God.

“Fuck me,” Bucky murmured, and Steve shot him a wry grin. Bucky couldn’t believe it.

“Let’s get you out of here,” Steve said, and Bucky did as he was asked.

Later on, when Bucky had been brought up to speed and was feeling better, he understood. Back when he’d still been stationed in the 107th, he’d heard stories of myths where people willingly went to the underworld for the people they loved, and while his other bunkmates had scoffed and shook their heads, Bucky had thought he could get behind that. After all, he’d gone to hell for Steve, and only for Steve. It just made sense. As long as Steve Rogers was alive—as long as there was something to protect—Bucky couldn’t leave.

Of course God wouldn’t let him die. He still had a job to do.

_Welcome to the end of days, Barnes._

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on [tumblr](http://thevinespeaketh.tumblr.com) (there is more Bucky angst there)!


End file.
